The widespread adoption of portable electronic devices, such as portable digital assistants (PDAs), has led to the development of novel user interfaces facilitating the entry of data and commands. Many such devices allow a user to enter alphanumeric data and pictorial commands directly on the display area of the device using a stylus. Such an approach necessitates efficient and reliable identification among a plurality of alphanumeric characters and pictorial commands available to be written and drawn by the user, referred to as an alphabet. One popular alphabet of pictorial commands is that utilized by the Graffiti system developed by Palm, Inc. The Graffiti alphabet comprises a set of single stroke, gestures, where a stroke is defined as a stylus trajectory between “stylus-down” and “stylus-up” events detected on the touch sensitive display area. Each single stroke gesture corresponds to one among a set of recognized alphanumeric characters, symbols (e.g. punctuation, simple arithmetic signs, asterisks, and similar symbols), accents (e.g. â and ä), and functions (e.g. TAB and RETURN). The Unistroke alphabet, developed by Xerox, is another example of a single stroke alphabet used for character recognition.